Odd Jobs: Essays and Criticism

by John Updike

  “El Supremo” was the popular nickname for the founder of independent Paraguay, José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia, who, after the bloodless coup against Spanish colonial rule in 1811, went from being secretary of the ruling junta to being Supreme Dictator; he ruled the country possessively and absolutely from 1814 until his death in 1840. A lawyer and one-time postulate for the priesthood, he held the degrees of master of philosophy and doctor of theology; he never married, and lived austerely, in an isolation akin to that which he imposed on the country he had founded. He forbade immigration and emigration and maintained neither diplomatic nor commercial ties with foreign countries. Within the embattled, landlocked country, his policies were aimed at developing a sense of independence and solidarity; a follower of the French Enlightenment, he curbed the power of the church and the aristocracy, introduced modern methods of agriculture, defended the rights of the Guaraní Indians, and maintained a formidable army. He wore a black suit and red cape and was rumored to be something of a sorceror. Paraguay, known to Americans mostly as the remote domain of the long-lived dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner, has had an interesting history. From its capital of Asunción the Spanish ruled a vast area and founded Buenos Aires. Its southeastern region was the site of communistic Jesuit missions—the eighteenth-century reducciones, which one writer on Latin America, Carlos Rangel, has described as “the best possible materialization of a City of God on earth.” And in the War of the Triple Alliance (1865–70) Paraguay defended itself against its two mighty neighbors, Brazil and Argentina, at the staggering cost of over half its population, including three-quarters of its men.

  The founder of this stubborn country, a George Washington with elements of Huey Long, Enver Hoxha, and Merlin, lies dying and raving, aloud and within his skull, through the over four hundred large pages of I the Supreme, whose texture is varied with double-column excerpts from historical works, some of which are imaginary.§ The valor and labor and intelligence exerted in this novel and in its faithful translation (including bits from the Guaraní, Portuguese, and Latin) intimidate criticism; suffice it to say that, if a masterpiece, it is the sort one should read for academic credit, and that much of its charm and interest presumably lie bound up in its virtuoso use of the original language. Many books have gone into the making of this book: contemporary and historical accounts of Francia’s Paraguay, government documents and the eighteenth-century sources of the dictator’s own extensive erudition, and the crabbed modern works of Joyce, Borges, and García Márquez, among others—there is even a sharp whiff of contemporary French interest in the elusiveness of texts and the multiplicity of signs.

  In books as in dinosaurs, however, largeness asks a strong spine, and I the Supreme holds no action as boldly intelligible as Leopold Bloom’s peregrination or the hunt for the Great White Whale. The looming, and virtually only, human relationship exists between the dying Francia and his obsequious secretary, Policarpo Patiño; their dialogues are given not only without quotation marks but without dashes or indentation, so that the secretary and dictator (himself once a secretary) tend to merge, while allusions to Don Quixote and Sancho Panza thicken around them. The central issue of suspense—the authorship of an anti-Francia pasquinade nailed to the door of the cathedral—is never, that this reader noticed, resolved. Nor does the author’s attitude toward his polymorphous, logorrheic hero come into clear view. Repulsion and fascination, clearly, but to what end? A kind of long curse concludes the novel—an enthusiastic descriptive catalogue of the insects and worms that will devour El Supremo’s corpse, and some condemnatory sentences in the author’s (or Patiño’s) voice:

  You fooled yourself and fooled others by pretending that your power was absolute. You lost your oil, you old ex theologian passing yourself off as a statesman.… You ceased to believe in God, but neither did you believe in the people with the true mystique of Revolution; the only one that leads a true locomotive-engineer of history to identify himself with its cause, not use it as a hiding place from his absolute vertical Person, in which worms are now feeding horizontally.

  One is led, by this learned book bristling with quaint particulars and amiable puns and verbal tumbles (“Yet the genes of gens engender tenacious traitorous taints”; “the filigreed fleuron in the vergered-perjured paper, the flagellated letters”), into a spiritual dungeon, a miasmal atmosphere of hate and bitter recalcitrance. The fictional Francia is most eloquent in his inveighing against the others—the devilish ecclesiastics, the “Porteños” of Buenos Aires—who threaten his power. He knows no positive connections; all is betrayal and potential assault. The inanimate objects that inspire and console and fortify him—a polished skull, a fallen meteorite, his ivory pen—supplant human faces and voices and whatever humane motives inspired, at the forging of a nation, his polity. The static, circling quality of many modernist masterworks is here overlaid with a political rigidity, an immobilizing rage that seizes both the tyrant and the exiled writer. I the Supreme differs from García Márquez’s Autumn of the Patriarch in that the dictator-hero of the latter is a coarse ignoramus, whereas Francia, in Roa Bastos’s reconstruction, suffers, amid the trappings of omnipotence, the well-known impotence and isolation of the modern intellectual.

  The muddy, murderous atmosphere of Latin-American politics is concentrated alarmingly in Osvaldo Soriano’s short novel, A Funny Dirty Little War. “Dirty war” conjures up, a bit misleadingly, Vietnam (“It’s a dirty little war but we have to fight it”—Dwight Eisenhower) and the campaign of domestic oppression carried on by the Argentine junta now on trial; the Spanish title, No habrá más penas ni olvido, is a line of a tango, “Mi Buenos Aires querido,” and translates as “There shall be no more sorrow or longing.” Soriano is an Argentinian who went into exile in 1976, when the junta took over, and returned in 1983, in which same year his book, written in 1980, could be published in Buenos Aires, having been previously published in Spain and, translated, in Italy and a number of other European countries. In 1984 it was made into a movie which won an award in Berlin—an action movie, presumably, since A Funny Dirty Little War is an absolute of sorts: it is virtually all action, and the action is virtually all ugly. In little more than a hundred pages, the attempt of one petty official to oust another farcically, inexorably, horribly sweeps a small Argentine town into a local holocaust of violence and murder.

  Suprino, the Party Secretary, accuses Mateo, the Town Clerk, of being a Communist, and enlists Inspector Llanos and Deputy Inspector Rossi and Guzman, the local auctioneer, in an attempt to oust Fuentes, the Council Leader, who opts to defend the town hall with two local policemen, a released prisoner, and Moyano, a humble gardener abruptly promoted to Director of Parks and Gardens. All these men know each other as fellow villagers, and all claim to be loyal Peronists, yet real bullets begin to fly, and real deaths occur: “The Inspector, posted in a doorway, Guzman and the wounded policeman from the house, and Suprino from the rooftop all fired at the town-hall windows. The shutters and the glass were blown to bits. Moyano fell back. Everybody in the office threw themselves to the floor.… The floor was spattered with blood. There was no sign of movement from Moyano.” The whirlwind of violence, fed by nameless youths on both sides, swirls on into the night, a Walpurgisnacht of rain and mud and confusion and torture given its perhaps too-symbolic capping when a drunken crop-duster drops a load of pig manure from his plane. It is slapstick in which people actually bleed: “Guzman the auctioneer threw himself underneath the Peugeot. Two of the men got into the car, and started off at full speed. Guzman felt its whole weight run over his right hand, and a stabbing pain shot the length of his arm. When he saw the blood spurting from his crushed fingers, he felt sick, and then fainted.” The rapid interlace of dialogue and blundering encounters opens, with sickening quickness, into unbearable pain:

  The brass knuckleduster smashed into Ignacio’s jaw. The Council Leader fell against the bank accounts filing cabinet, and vaguely realised that something was cutting into his back. He fel
t as though he was chewing his own teeth.… A shrill buzzing was spinning round inside his skull, and finally settled in his brain. He could hear a moaning sound coming from his throat. His own scream gave him a feeling of horror. He attempted to force his eyes open, but the lids seemed as heavy as lead curtains. Eventually, by gripping the edges of the desk, he managed to raise his eyelids. He saw a red, smoking tip. Solid fire pressed on his eyes. He felt as though his head were a chaos of pain which he could not fuse into a whole. He longed for death to rescue him from the nightmare.

  When dawn at last comes, all of the insurrectionists but the instigator have been killed, and two survivors from the other side have this bleary exchange: “It’s going to be a beautiful day, Sergeant.” “A day … for Perón.”

  But Perón, the ultimate target of this horrific satire, did not create Latin-American authoritarianism, nor did his passing end it, even in Argentina. Soriano plausibly builds his civic nightmare upon basic human competitiveness and macho pride; he so persuasively shows how a sleepy town can descend into carnage, and its middle-aged officeholders turn into cruel civil warriors, that we ask ourselves what spell holds in harmless suspension the rivalries and ambitions of our own local governments. Not that the United States, especially in its frontier territories, has not known lawless feuds, lynchings, and criminality claiming to be guerrilla protest. But official power is transferred peaceably here, with a tolerance for dissent only sporadically and precariously observed in our sister continent’s many constituted republics. We may dislike our government but are not, by and large, afraid of it, or afraid of its sudden collapse, and a book like A Funny Dirty Little War reminds us what a luxury this is, and how thin is the skin of social order.

  Humberto Costantini, another Argentinian recently returned from exile, has written The Long Night of Francisco Sanctis, which also describes a single nightmarish period of less than twenty-four hours. And again, comedy turns deadly, with the difference that in Soriano’s book it is as if the amiable little village world of Don Camillo were blackened by the laconic ugliness of Hemingway’s war writing, while Costantini begins with a mild, musing, midlife protagonist like Italo Svevo’s Zeno—who is, like him, preoccupied by giving up smoking. Soriano’s is a style of brutal efficiency; Costantini’s is ruminative, chatty, with humorously elaborate chapter titles, such as

  CHAPTER I. In which, so as to keep the reader from raising his hopes too high with regard to the entertainment value of this little book, it is here stated without further ado that its subject matter is of a more or less psychological nature—or, in other words, that the prospect ahead is fairly humdrum. Thus forewarned, the reader can now be told something about a certain telephone call that came from out of the blue.

  Francisco Sanctis, the forty-one-year-old head accountant for a small Buenos Aires grocery wholesaling firm, happily married and economically prospering, is phoned one day (Friday, November 11, 1977) at his desk by a ghost from his past—Elena Vaccaro, who seventeen years ago was an overweight fellow university student, like the youthful Sanctis active in literary and left-wing circles. Though their relationship was casual and unconsummated, she now asks him to meet her immediately, on the flimsy excuse that an old student poem of his is being reprinted in a Venezuelan magazine. He very grudgingly agrees to rendezvous on a street corner, and she, grown unexpectedly lean and glamorous, drives him around in her Renault while explaining that what she really wants is for Sanctis to notify two men that they are going to be abducted by the goons of Air Force Intelligence that night. He is naturally reluctant to become involved, contented bourgeois that he is, and yet enough of his old idealism lingers to let this abruptly assigned mission nag at him; he spends the rest of the novel, far into the night, indecisively wandering the streets of Buenos Aires.

  The exposition is leisurely, confident, urbane. The gently erotic comedy of Sanctis’s encounter with his old semi-flame (she admired him, in her plump radical days) is almost Cheeveresque, as he mentally takes her sociological temperature: “Sanctis observes her closely and draws some hasty conclusions: solid economic background, a social life, a pitiless diet consisting of a small glass of grapefruit juice and such for breakfast, dance or body expression, swimming or tennis, beauty treatments and yoga, a very busy husband, independence, the odd lighthearted affair.” In his own apartment, where he briefly alights after ten o’clock, he notices that his wife, María Angélica, has put a bottle of wine in the refrigerator and that her remarks to him are accompanied “by a certain tone and a sleepy smile that Sanctis knows well and that have to do with bed, with a certain French perfume that only now he’s aware he’s been smelling without being conscious of it.” Nevertheless, torn between domestic bliss and political conscience, he goes out into the streets again.

  We have been here before, in Argentine novels, in this double invisible net where the secret police and the revolutionary underground intersect on a street corner—for example, Manuel Puig’s Kiss of the Spiderwoman. What struck me, following Sanctis’s increasingly ominous perambulations, was how Borgesian this Buenos Aires is—the practically endless, undistinguished streets that gather to themselves a mysterious maziness wherein a specific address becomes charged with some unspeakable spiritual burden. For Borges, Buenos Aires is not just a city, or even his city, but all cities, a horizontal, paved embodiment of our human lostness. In an early poem, “Daybreak,” he wrote:

  In the deep universal night

  scarcely dispelled by the flickering gaslamps

  a gust of wind coming out of nowhere

  stirs the silent streets

  with a trembling presentiment

  of the hideous dawn that haunts

  like some lie

  the tumbledown outskirts of cities all over the world.

  As Sanctis approaches, at three in the morning, the second of his two addresses, the author asserts that “something is taking place here in these placid middle-class streets in Villa Urquiza, among old acacias, rubbish bins, pretty little houses, and the silent padding of some cat on the prowl—something serious, something we don’t want to explain too closely.” Beneath the surface of social order, something atrocious waits. As with Kafka’s, Borges’s allegories may be less cosmic and more political than we think. His favorite adjectives—“atrocious” and “labyrinthine”—touch on life in a totalitarian state, and what is the Minotaur who fascinates him but the Dictator, brute power lurking and waiting to consume those trapped in the maze of inscrutable prerogatives and prohibitions? Borges’s curious theology of defective or malign gods and the terror that fringes his stately anecdotes merely give the news, it may be, about Latin-American absolutism. As Costantini’s hero moves through “the labyrinth of his own city,” he evokes other books surveyed here: “with the desperate gesture of a shipwrecked sailor,” he beckons a waiter and reminds us of Luis Velasco adrift on the “dense sea filled with strange creatures,” and in reflecting upon “this miasma of stupidity and violence in which we’re plunged up to our necks” he sums up the viscid immersion of A Funny Dirty Little War. All three short narratives make us feel a desperate insecurity, a dreadful bottomlessness to things, a moral chaos in which a bland decent Everyman like Sanctis becomes, against the dark background, a saint.

  • • •

  Adolfo Bioy Casares has been known in the English-speaking world primarily as a friend and collaborator of Jorge Luis Borges, and the coauthor of the ornate literary jokes of Chronicles of Bustos Domecq (1967). Bioy Casares, however, is a prolific and successful writer on his own, and nearly a generation younger than Borges—he was born in 1914, and Borges in 1899. (Gabriel García Márquez was born in 1928, Augusto Roa Bastos in 1917, Osvaldo Soriano in 1943, Humberto Costantini in 1924.) Bioy Casares’s The Invention of Morel and Other Stories arrives with a double Borgesian stamp: a preface by the master to the long title story and pen-and-ink illustrations by Norah Borges de Torre, Borges’s sister. The illustrations are clumsy and few and do little harm. The preface is
a provocative and revealing critical document; like The Invention of Morel, it dates from 1940. It claims that this Invention is perfect (“To classify it as perfect is neither an imprecision nor a hyperbole”) and represents a blow in the good fight against that deplorable nineteenth-century invention, the plotless “psychological” novel, which includes Balzac, the Russians, and Proust. Borges was, we might say, the first self-consciously postmodern writer; his rebellion against Proust and Joyce and Woolf and James took the form of preferring Shaw, Wilde, Wells, and Chesterton. His preface offers the detective story—at its peak in the Thirties—as an example of what “works of reasoned imagination” might be. He and Bioy Casares collaborated on detective stories as well as on film scripts, anthologies, and translations. In a sense, Bioy Casares—whom Borges called “really and secretly the master” in these collaborations—armed the Borgesian counterrevolution. He provided boyish bravado, a typewriter, and, in The Invention of Morel, a prime text; the little novel won a municipal literary award in Buenos Aires and impressed such rising literati as Octavio Paz and Julio Cortázar. Further, it came to the attention of another postmodern theorizer, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and inspired the betranced repetitions and overlaps of his film Last Year at Marienbad.

  Read in 1986, The Invention of Morel entertains in the dated way of science fiction by Wells or Jules Verne. Technology betrays its own acolytes: Wells’s Time Machine was a late-Victorian gewgaw, a “glittering metallic framework” with parts of nickel and ivory and crystal, a kind of idealized elevator cage, and Alfred Jarry went into futuristic raptures over the then-newest thing, the bicycle. Bioy Casares, as of 1940, was understandably struck by the inventions of the motion-picture projector and the phonograph, which preserve reality as seen and heard; he imagines an island where an obsessed inventor, Morel, has constructed machines, tirelessly powered by the tides, that over and over project, in three palpable dimensions, the same recorded scenes of a week among friends. Thus he has created a kind of paradise, an eternity of returns; the original objects captured by his superphotography unfortunately wither and perish, but this seems a modest price to pay. Onto this island blunders our nameless narrator, who slowly comes to understand the illusion and, eventually, to enroll in it. Movies can’t do that, we want to protest, just as elevators and bicycles can’t become time machines. Nevertheless, there are ingenious technological twists: doors that normally open freeze shut when they are being projected, and broken walls implacably heal, sealing our hero in. And there are poignant moments: one of the projected beings, Faustine, becomes a love object for the castaway, and, as he disintegrates, his early life in Venezuela, from which he is a political exile, becomes another frozen paradise, projected in his head. But our interest in this rather too intricate fable, and in the six accompanying short stories from a 1948 volume, La trama celeste, tends to be magnetized by the elements that are, with a striking distinctness, Borgesian.